Photo credit: garryknight from flickr
We suck at thinking, all of us– humanity. It’s poetically tragic given that we haven’t met any life forms who can do a better job of it yet.
We skeptics enjoy thinking of ourselves as rational and reasonable, smugly superior among a vast sea of credulous, closed-minded believers. But we’re not nearly as clever as we think, nor are we very different from the true believers.
There are so many fallacies and biases that I can’t keep them straight, even though critical thinking is something I value highly. I’m not much good at debate, and although I’d love nothing more than to engender critical thinking and skepticism in others, I don’t have any good ideas on how to do that, except maybe hitting them with a WWIT? question.
But what about aspiring skeptics– people who already have the spark of reason but haven’t yet learned to see the fnords on their own?
I saw this somewhere on the Internet a few days ago and have since forgotten the source. But it’s so elegant that I want to spread the meme. Plus, a post on Friendly Atheist reminded me again.
“What would it take to convince you that you’re wrong?”
That one sentence is all you need to figure out whether someone is capable of being reasonable about any particular subject. In fact, making people admit to themselves that they’re not willing to entertain any possibility of being wrong, could be enough to break the spell.
From Skepchick:
I love that most everyone here is willing to be wrong about everything.
Through disagreements, we are able to see our views reflected back at us and change them if necessary. Or, even if they don’t change, we may gain insight into just why we hold a particular view.
That’s how I try to approach my whole life. It’s just as rewarding to “lose” an argument as to be right in the first place. Either way, it means I come out of the discussion feeling smart.
There are many confirmation biases and magical thinking tendencies that fuel testimonial and anecdotal evidence for the efficacy of woo, from acupuncture and chiropractic all the way up to the giant woo umbrella of “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) or “integrative” medicine.
But that’s not why these things are a threat to actual real scientific medicine (ARSM?). The real danger is when CAM seems to get real results.
Jesus died for our sins. Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world. As much as that was repeated to me growing up, and as innocently as I believed it, I never really comprehended how it could work. Why should killing God produce any positive effect at all? Wouldn’t that be rather a black mark? Anyway why does someone dying impact someone else’s sin?
Another quick redirect; I love this writeup of how we are stupid at risk assessment . I wish a few of the people close to me would learn up on this a bit.
The precautionary principle can so easily be abused to the point that it becomes a zero risk bias .
This is a TED video from 2006, but I just now watched it. Michael Shermer talks about cognitive bias, pareidolia, and other interesting ways we fool ourselves.
Michael Shermer at TED.com: Why people believe strange things
It’s a delightful 12 minute refutation of stupidity.
Stolen from the blinkenlights box :
Science is not–I repeat, not–a method for finding out the "truth" about anything. Without going into a great deal of detail, I would characterize science as a methodology that allows us to test our beliefs about how nature behaves with how nature actually behaves and to derive laws and theories with useful predictive power that allow us to predict how nature will behave under certain conditions. In fact, it could well be argued that science is a method of testing hypotheses, refuting them, and through that process coming up with hypotheses that better explain how nature works.
Word.
